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This idea of having to store stuff for 100K years is so fantastically ridiculous that I can't really believe anyone takes it seriously.

Almost 400 years ago, the Swedish king Gustaf II Adolf planted oak trees outside of Stockholm, with the expressed intent that they were to be used as war ships in the twentieth century. The oaks are still standing. They are nice and everything, but it's sort of laughable to imagine that they will be cut down for war ships. Still, when he lived, the difference between life then and life 400 years earlier wasn't all that dramatic.

This is of course completely different now. We can be *extremely* certain that we will be able to either use the remaining energy in the nuclear "waste" or dispose of it in a completely safe way in the next 100 years (or, heaven forbid, that we blow up the planet entirely, in which case the point is pretty moot). The probability that none of that happens, civilization disappears, then reappears in some form in 50,000 years, and that they are able to dig up the buried waste, but can't read warning signs and don't have Geiger cuonters or similar instruments is almost as close to 0% as it is possible to get.

If that is your best argument against nuclear power, you have nothing to stand on. Nothing.

What you are saying is in effect "We have local monopolies. That's bad. Let's add regulations to make sure that the local monopolies wont' do bad things." That is putting a lot of faith in regulation. How did that work in other markets?

The only thing that will help is breaking up the local monopolies. That is where poeple should put their lobbying efforts. ANything else is a fool's errand.

You are missing the fact that Net Neuttrality hinders the development of alternative business models. This is bad for everyone, but especially bad for customers who are least well served by the mainstream alternative. This is pretty much exacty poor people.

Net Neutrality is only needed because of the last mile monopoly. Remove that and no one would have thought of the idea of NN for a second. You don't like the practices of your local ISP? Well, get another one, then. As long as there is a last mile monopoly, the situation isn't ever going to be good (for consumers - it's excellent for monopolists!). Fight that instead!

This is also, not coincidentally, why the NN debate is much less intense (in fact, almost non-existent) in Europe.

The Nordic countries are not socialist at all. In may ways, they are more free market than the US. For instance, you don't need occupational licensing to clip someones nails or decorate their homes. I know it's a nice story if you like socialism to point to Sweden or Norway as a good example. Unforunately, it's quite incorrect.

Where I live there are 2 broadband providers, COMCAST (cable) and VERIZON (fios). Every other place I have lived there was only one option.

This is really all one needs to know. If anyone believes that anything good is going to come out of a situation with local monopolies, well, that person is simply wrong. And if there are no local monopolies, there is every reason to believe that the market is going to sort this out way, way better than some bureaucrat with an agenda.

Fight the local monopolies. That is the only truly important thing right now.

The top 1 item is VBA in Excel. If you don't have that, you can't get the power users to switch, and if the power users don't switch, you won't be successful. I've said it before and I'll say it again, this time in a mad Ballmer voice: Excel, Excel, Excel. If Linux would have a better spreadsheet option for power users, the entire financial sector would switch in a heartbeat, and the rest of the world would soon follow.

However, it turns out that it's actually hard to build something that is better than Excel. Really, really hard. Don't hold your breath waiting for this.

It's not 1% of the top users, but probably 5%-15%. And if what you offer isn't good enough for the 5%-15% top users, what you offer isn't usable in the entire organization. And if it isn't usable in the entire organization, it isn't usable at all. MS has known this all along. The FOSS movement still hasn't udnerstood it. Sad, really.

That may or may not be true, but it most definitely isn't true at all for power users, and especially so for power users of Excel. These users may not be representable of a typical user, but they are the ones actually running the business and they have enormous power. Suggesting that LibreOffice is "just fine" for these people is ignorant, and also the reason Linux won't make it on the desktop. If you don't even try to understand your users, what you offer isn't going to be good enough.

It's more healthy to live in the stone age because why, exactly? Average life span has tripled since the stone age, and that is generally considered the best proxy for health there is.

Also, the idea that we work more now than we did in the stone age is also completely wrong. A regular employee works ~1600 hours/year for ~40 years. That's less than 10% of their time. Stone age people certainly worked more than 10% of their lives (even though I agree that it may be a myth that they worked most of the time.)

You completely miss the very obvious point that information from other sources may have a bearing on the value of a company. If I spot a trend in the subway I may draw the conclusion that some companies stand to gain more from that trend than other companies. Your static view of the world is way too simplified.

As others have pointed out, the optimal solution is never more than 20 moves, and this instance required a bit more than 20 moves, so it probably wasn't the very easiest of configurations. That said, I don't understand why this record isn't for "best average of 20 runs" (or some other suitable number). It wouldn't take more than five minutes to run it, and it would be a lot more telling about the actual capacity of the robot.

It would also be interesting to see the variance of the solving times. How consistent is this thing?